The Center for Equal Opportunity has been particularly active in recent months with its ongoing project of warning state and local governments (especially cities and counties) not to start down the road of awarding government contracts with an eye on race, ethnicity, and sex.  Here’s the sort of memorandum (citations and links omitted) we send to the relevant officials, most recently in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia: We are writing with regard to a recent news story, which was brought to our attention this week and which discusses the City’s minority contracting efforts. We urge the City to be …

At last week’s prayer breakfast, President Trump made fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s poor ratings as his replacement on Celebrity Apprentice, but he also said this:  “So in the coming days, we will develop a system to help ensure that those admitted into our country fully embrace our values of religious and personal liberty, and that they reject any form of oppression and discrimination.  We want people to come into our nation, but we want people to love us and to love our values — not to hate us and to hate our values.” The President’s remarks about Mr. Schwarzenegger were …

I had occasion recently to post on National Review Online this short summary of why the accusation of “white privilege” is poisonous: It is, for starters, a divisive phrase, much more likely to hurt race relations than help them, as it lumps together all white people — many of whom cannot be considered “privileged” by any reasonable standard — and points an accusatory finger at them, asserting, “You don’t deserve what you have.” It is, at bottom, just another way of complaining about stereotyping, even though all racial groups — indeed, all groups, period — face stereotyping, some negative and …

A couple of years ago, a bad Senate resolution was introduced, encouraging the entire private sector to adopt a ramped-up version of the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule”: That rule originally required that at least one racial minority be introduced for any head coaching vacancy, and the Senate resolution now wants interviewed at least two “qualified minority candidates for each managerial opening at the director level and above” and least two minority-owned businesses for vendor contracts. Well, that bad Senate resolution is back.  What remains especially lamentable is that it’s being proposed not by Bernie Sanders but by Tim Scott, who should …

Let me begin my take on Barack Obama’s farewell address last week and the state of race relations as he leaves office by quoting what I wrote in 2004, after he delivered the Democratic National Convention keynote that vaulted him into the public eye: Barack Obama gave a fine speech, but it was not a speech that reflects the current Democratic Party. It celebrated America as “a magical place”; it did not bemoan our racism and imperialism. It professed that this black man “owe[d] a debt to those who came before” him; it did not call for reparations. It spoke …

The Department of Justice has law-enforcement responsibilities in all kinds of areas: antitrust, tax, environment, general criminal and civil litigation, and so forth.  But just about all the opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the department as attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is because of one area:  civil rights.  That happens to be the Center for Equal Opportunity’s area, too. Opponents to the nomination are trying to paint Sen. Sessions as a racist, and as someone who therefore will be unenthusiastic about enforcing the civil-rights laws.  But the real concern here is not that Sen. Sessions will not …

As we count our blessings at the end of the year, don’t forget to include thanks to Senator Mitch McConnell and the Senate Judiciary Committee for what they’ve done to keep the federal judiciary from getting any worse than it already is. It’s hard to win even good lawsuits with bad judges. A few examples that have come across my desk just in the past week or so: George Leef has a fine column on how Grand Valley State University has been sued, rightly, for violating the free-speech rights of its students. Microsoft ought to be sued if it decides …